Yes, that was my intent.... A servo fault would indicate a servo no longer capable of moving, of course, and that is a mode where I want to shut the machine off (estop or machine off seem to have the same net result to me... the relay providing power to the amps will drop out, etc)
OK, good... I think we're onto something. I want to do some more experimenting before I feel comfortable stating that the commenting of the three fault sense signals (X, Y, and Z) directly correlates with the VistaCNC pendant losing sync (BTW, shutting down LinuxCNC and then restarting it re-enables the pendant... I don't need to disconnect it or anything).
I was integrating the fault lines into my HAL as one of the later steps before I mothballed everything last year. It is possible that I didn't detect that the pendant had stopped working last year. My primary focus was on adding the three state lights to my control panel (fault, neg limit, pos limit). As such, I could have been working entirely with the mouse and computer display.
I think my next step will be to (figure out and then) add a pushbutton switch to my UI and reconfigure my HAL so that I can manually "trigger" a fault; this would replace my comparator and sense of the real amplifier output. If that condition results in the pendant going into its lost communication mode, then I think we've nailed the cause of my problem. Sound like a reasonable plan?
Is it possible that my LinuxCNC is corrupted? That seems awfully unlikely in my mind, but does it happen often?[strike] I guess I should look at how one upgrades the application. I doubt (hope) that I need to reinstall the whole image. Getting to the latest released version probably makes sense though[/strike]. Never mind.... I guess I *am* on the latest version!
